“Calculating Reparations” by William Raspberry, is an online newspaper article, obviously about reparations. Reparations are a debt that is repaid to a certain group and in this article, it focuses on the reparations that “White America” owes “Black America”. It can be easily understood that black Americans have gone through a plethora of things while in this country: slavery, segregation, endless discrimination, etc. Richard America (this is his actual name) is a professor at Georgetown University School of Business has stated that reparations must be acknowledged; that the acknowledgement will help Americans get past ceaseless debates over “set-asides”, enforced diversity, and affirmative action. While the professor doesn’t believe that the costs of these …show more content…
Are you entitled to keep what amounts to ill-gotten gains?” The professor is trying to say that white Americans can apologize over and over again, but do they have the right to keep the benefits that they have accumulated over the past 200 or so. America answers his own question with an obvious, “no,” and he goes on to calculate the approximate amount of reparations that indebted to the black community. “I've tried to show that it's possible using census data, the work of economists like Lester Thurow and certain mathematical models to estimate broadly how much whites have benefited from their whiteness since, say, 1930 and then to pluck in some assumptions about slavery going back to 1619. I come up with an estimate of between 5 and 10 trillion dollars in present value." It is apparent that the total amount of reparations due is a high number, but this number is far too high to ever be reached. In 1995, the total of all personal income taxes from every American leveled out to be $613.1